How to increase B2B sales: 3 key levers + 9 proven strategies

Tired of advice about personalizing outreach and training your sales reps? Learn how to increase B2B sales with practical tactics beyond the basics.

For experienced teams, ways to increase B2B sales hinge on targeted improvements and applying proven strategies across three essential fronts: generating a higher-quality pipeline, optimizing current sales operations, and expanding business with existing clients.

Belkins has helped over 1,000 clients improve sales while decreasing cycle times by up to 25% and shaving as much as 20% off the customer acquisition cost. In many cases, we were able to double sales pipelines using precisely these methods.

Let’s see what made it possible!

Increase your pipeline considerably with new business

And we’re not talking about chasing just any lead. To truly grow, you need a stream of properly qualified opportunities entering your pipeline. To get it right from the beginning, be strategic about who you target, how you reach them, and how your internal processes are set up to handle them efficiently.

Stick to refining ICP, messaging, and positioning

Even well-established sales processes benefit from regularly sharpening the ideal customer profile (ICP). Small drifts in targeting, like engaging companies slightly outside your optimal size or whose specific problems aren’t quite the right fit, can drain resources and lead to deals that don’t stick. 

Make sure to fine-tune your targeting of the right individuals within those companies, too. As people change positions within companies, conversations with contacts who can’t make the decision or don’t see a benefit are simply a waste of valuable time.

Why should you do it?

Sales efforts applied outside your precise ICP waste time and budget. Consistently refining the ICP and honing your messaging to target the core business needs of that profile takes dozens of hours out of your marketers’ work each month but leads directly to higher quality leads, faster sales cycles, and customers who stay longer.

Tips and tricks

1. Know your ICP on a granular level. Define your ICP not just by industry and size but by specific challenges, goals, and the typical buying process within those companies. Ask yourself: Who feels the pain? Who influences the decision?

2. Validate assumptions with hard data. Don’t blindly rely on hypotheses. Enrich the insights with your sales data, closed-lost analysis, and market intel from tools like Clay, FullEnrich, and BetterContact to define and refine your target.
3. Test and iterate all the time. Use A/B testing for outreach to different segments or personas within your hypothetical ICP to see who responds best. Analyze the results. Apply what works best. Rinse and repeat.

4. Enrich your messages. Your messaging and value proposition delivery should be relevant to the point that it reads like a one-off email. Base your pitch on the publicly available data from your prospect’s press releases, media appearances, posts in social media, investor pitches, or 10-K.

📚 Read more: How to create an ideal customer profile

Go omnichannel

Relying on a single channel like cold email or paid ads alone is like fishing with only one type of bait — you’ll miss most of the fish. Use all four outbound channels to reach prospects: email, LinkedIn, calls, and paid ads. Then, craft campaigns with inbound boosters like webinars or lead magnets and once again follow them up with the outbound channels. 

An omnichannel strategy that coherently activates all its stages logically helps you reach your customers wherever they are. It reinforces your message at more touchpoints and improves your chances of getting a response. 

📚 Read more: Omnichannel lead generation for B2B: How to do it right

Why should you do it?

While managing multiple channels requires effort and budget, the cost of not doing so is missed opportunities and falling behind competitors. An integrated omnichannel strategy more effectively builds your product’s presence in the prospect’s ecosystem, leading to better brand recognition, openness to dialogue, and, ultimately, conversion rates.

Tips and tricks

1. Integrate, don’t just multitask. Ensure your channels work together — that’s the whole point. Use retargeting ads based on email engagement, refer back to the webinar activity, reference website visits in outreach, and ensure consistent messaging everywhere.
2. Map channels to the journey. Use broader channels (content, LinkedIn posting) for awareness and more precise channels (email, InMail messages, calls) for the consideration and decision stages.
3. Track and analyze. Track which combinations of touchpoints lead to conversions. Double down on what works for specific segments of your ICP. 
4. Connect outreach and marketing. Use outreach to follow up on marketing engagement signals for a powerful one-two punch. Develop sidekick campaigns to address marketing opportunities like big industry events or seasonal business spikes. 

Move SDR to work under marketing

This might sound unorthodox, but placing your sales development representative (BDR/SDR) team under the marketing umbrella can be a game-changer for pipeline velocity and quality. Why? 

Marketing excels at process, scale, and automation — exactly what it takes to manage top-of-funnel and MQL qualifications. Sales teams typically have different skills and mindsets focused on closing deals. Placing SDRs within marketing leverages the strengths of both parties, leading to tighter lead definitions and faster feedback loops compared to structures where SDRs report to sales.

📚 Read more: How to achieve sales and marketing alignment

Why should you do it?

The shift initially calls for a clear process definition and strong inter-departmental communication. But the reward is well worth it: quicker insights into campaign effectiveness, higher-quality leads, smoother handoffs, and, quite possibly, a hefty increase in MQL-to-SQL rates.

Benefits

1. Faster and clearer feedback. Marketing gets near real-time insights into lead quality, campaigns, and messaging resonance directly from the frontline SDRs.
2. Process alignment. SDR activities become tightly integrated with marketing automation, nurturing sequences, and scoring systems.
3. Improved speed and efficiency. Marketing’s process-driven approach simplifies lead qualification and handoff to the sales team, reducing lead leakage.
4. The human touch. SDRs can immediately step in and provide personalized intervention within automated sequences when buying signals appear, accelerating conversion.
5. Clearer accountability. Moving SDRs under marketing and setting up the shared goals removes the classic “sales blaming marketing for bad leads” friction point.

Increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your current process

Generating new leads is of little use if your pipeline is leaking. Too often, potential deals stall due to inefficient follow-up, lack of nurturing, or simply giving up too soon. By optimizing your internal processes and playing the long game, you can improve your B2B sales, squeeze more value out of your existing pipeline, and turn near-misses into wins.

Use employee branding, thought leadership, and ABM on the existing pipeline

Your company’s experts and executives have credibility. Using their personal brands and thought leadership can attract new leads, but even better, it is incredibly powerful for nurturing high-value accounts already in your pipeline. 

Having a recognized leader share relevant insights, engage with prospects’ content, or reach out personally can rebuild stalled momentum or add weight during decision-making. This blends perfectly with account-based marketing (ABM) principles.

Example

Imagine a key prospect has gone quiet. Instead of another generic follow-up from the account executive (AE), they suddenly get a relevant article or insightful comment on LinkedIn from your VP of product, giving out a sample of your company’s expertise. Leads generated through trusted personal brands often have smoother, faster closures.

Benefits

1. Build trust. Prospects tend to perceive insights from experts or executives as more credible than standard corporate messages or outreach.
2. Humanize your brand. Messages from real people within your company make interactions feel less like dealing with a faceless entity and more like a peer-to-peer relationship.
3. Reinforce value. Insightful content authored by your team members shows expertise and a deep understanding of the prospect’s industry or challenges, reinforcing your value proposition.
4. Support ABM. Thought leadership pieces or personalized messages from company experts become credible touchpoints for decision-makers, helping account-based marketing efforts.

Nurture the pipeline with multiple omnichannel steps 

Unfortunately, deals don’t always close on your timeline. More often, they close on the buyer’s timeline. And if you don’t follow it, leaving prospects alone after a demo or a few follow-ups, you’re committing pipeline suicide. 

To address this, you can build structured nurturing sequences across multiple channels (email, LinkedIn engagement, occasional check-in calls from SDRs) to stay top-of-mind without being annoying. What should you follow up with? Pick the content based on where they are in the funnel — general tips for the early-stage prospects and case studies for those further down the pipeline.

Why should you do it?

Keeping deals warm requires staff time to manage the process and budget to create helpful content for prospects at different buying stages. Weigh this cost against the risk of losing potential sales just because you didn’t stay consistently engaged while prospects were making up their minds.

Tips and tricks

1. Map content to the journey. You wouldn’t want to send generic newsletters, as they might annoy the prospects instead of luring them in. Provide specific value relevant to their buying stage and likely challenges.
2. Use multiple channels. Reinforce email nurturing with social media retargeting, invitations to webinars, or LinkedIn engagement.
3. Automate wisely. Use marketing automation for consistency, but empower SDRs/AEs to jump in with personalized outreach when engagement calls for manual control.
4. Be enchantingly persistent. Remember those deals that closed after 500 or 800+ days? It happens. Don’t give up; just adjust the frequency and content for long-term plays.

Reengage and activate lost deals

"Closed-lost" shouldn’t mean "lost forever." Often, a deal falls through due to timing, budget constraints, internal changes, or choosing a competitor (whose solution might ultimately not work out). 

Analyzing why you lost (Was it the price? Features that didn’t fit? The wrong ICP?) provides invaluable insights. More importantly, keep these lost opportunities in a dedicated, low-frequency nurturing track.

Example

You probably have a similar story: A prospect chose a competitor but still came back to you six months later. To ensure this happens as often as possible, keep such cases on a low-touch email list with an occasional industry insights newsletter. If you launch a major new feature relevant to their pains, reach out personally. 

Tips and tricks

1. Analyze the “Why?”. Always do a retrospective. Systematically categorize the reasons for a loss to find patterns and improve your process or ICP definition.
2. Segment for reengagement. Treating all lost deals the same means leaving money on the table. Segment based on the reasoning. A poor ICP fit? Remove them from the list (and adjust lead scraping if needed). Lost them on timing/budget? Add them to the nurturing sequences and follow up in a few months.
3. Stay on their radar (casually). Use long-term, value-add nurturing (not constant sales pitches) to stay on top of their mind in a good way.
4. Monitor for signals. Track if they reengage with your content, they visit your website, or trigger events happen (e.g., competitor news, funding rounds) that might revive the opportunity.
5. Be thoughtful and strategic. In B2B sales, the one who plays the long game wins. Some of your biggest checks might come from prospects who said "no" initially. Patience and thoughtful re-engagement pay off.

Open up new opportunities with existing clients

Selling to existing clients is drastically cheaper than chasing and onboarding new ones (and this is why the subscription model has taken over the world). By leveraging your client base, you save on customer acquisition costs.

Let’s examine what tactics, in addition to the well-known up-sell and cross-sell routes, you can use to improve B2B sales via your existing customer database.

Promote a client referral program

A client referral program is a set system of bonuses that encourages existing clients to advise their friends, close circles, or even followers to use your services.

Why should you do it?

Referral programs are very efficient and need almost no resources for upkeep. Set up an incentive for your existing clients to recommend you to their circles; it can be a bonus, a discount, or a free portion of your product or service. Ensure your existing clients know about this program: Mention it in the onboarding process and send a reminder now and then.

Tips and tricks

1. Keep it easy. Complicated referrals scare potential referrers off. Make it simple for customers to bring their friends or colleagues and collect rewards.
2. Provide attractive incentives. Make the rewards desirable. Whether it’s discounts, credits, or exclusive access, align the incentives with your customers’ needs.
3. Focus on data. Leverage customer insights, such as net promoter score (NPS) or usage profiles, to identify your most likely advocates.
4. Market your program. Don’t rely on customers to find your referral program on their own. Incorporate it into your email campaigns, in-app notifications, and site.
5. Track and optimize. Monitor the number of referrals, conversion rates, and ROI. Use this data to gradually adjust your program.

Co-market with clients

Co-marketing is a strategy in which two or more complementary businesses cooperate to promote each other’s products or services. Two brands unite their marketing efforts to reach twice as many audience members with one campaign, reinforcing each other’s reputation.

Suppose you have a relevant non-competing business among your clients. In that case, you can set up a strategic partnership to jointly market more effectively to new potential customers outside your audience and potentially get good PR coverage.

Co-marketing campaigns can take different forms, such as co-marketing webinars, new product launches, and small-scale partner events (workshops, seminars, product unveilings, exclusive VIP dinners, roundtables, etc.).

Example

Belkins had been doing podcasts with our clients for several years, talking about sales, business, opportunities, and life lessons with the amazing businesspeople who have compounded hundreds of years of experience. This persistence took us to the point where, in Season 4, we were able to invite the top thought leaders in global sales and marketing, reinforcing new leads’ confidence in our expertise.

Why should you do it?

The cost of your co-marketing efforts will depend on the type of campaign you’re running. An offline event, like an exclusive VIP dinner for a few hundred high-net-worth clients, will set you back way more than a co-hosted webinar run by you and your co-marketing partner’s top experts. In any case, sharing the expenses makes co-marketing a cost-effective strategy for running campaigns that might have been financially challenging otherwise.

Process

1. Find the right partner. The secret to successful co-marketing is in the partner. Search for businesses that cater to your target market but don’t provide the same products or services as you.
2. Define objectives. Clear goals make it easier to communicate what you want to get out of the partnership in a co-marketing campaign. Looking for a way to expand lead generation or boost sales? Tell your partners about it like it is — having a common vision brings everyone together.
3. Create compelling content. Content is the lifeblood of co-marketing initiatives. Work together to create content that brings value to both of your audiences. This could be in the form of blog posts, webinars, newsletter hijacks, videos, social media campaigns, and more.
4. Establish cross-promotion channels. Find out the best marketing channels to target your audience. This could be email marketing, social, website shout-outs, or co-hosted online or offline events.
5. Measure and analyze. Define KPIs depending on your goals (sharing rate, referral visits, new leads in pipeline) and regularly check if your co-marketing activities are effective. This helps with mid-course corrections and enhancements to the entire process.

Establish ambassadorship

An ambassador is a client, employee, or partner who actively shares and promotes a brand or product via word of mouth, social media, etc. Having brand ambassadors promote your content and brand is no less important in B2B than in B2C: having thought leaders skyrocketed from 20th to 3rd position in 2024 in the rank of B2B buyers’ decision drivers.

In the perfect world, you’d want every one of your clients to become your brand ambassador, wouldn’t you? Just imagine — what if every person who ever used your services walked around telling everyone about how happy they are, how great your results are, and how everyone should buy from you!

In the real world, customer ambassadorship must be carefully built and nurtured, often via a strategic agreement you extend to the industry’s most trusted and influential voices.  

Example

The “EY.ai Transformation Experience” at MWC Barcelona 2024 involved major executives from the company’s biggest accounts. Among them, the CEO of Aramco Digital was the keynote speaker — a compelling way to reinstate EY’s leadership in AI-powered business transformation.

Why should you do it?

The cost of getting B2B ambassadors on board will vary depending on many factors, including whether the relationship is external or internal, the scale of the endorsement efforts, and the degree of active involvement in campaigns. Consider the ambassador program setup, ambassador training, and campaign support expenses when budgeting. 

The benefits

1. Get more bang for your buck. Choose the ambassadors that add value (aligned business goals and values, the audience you’d like to have as clients), and they will help to grow your reach impressively for a fraction of the direct marketing budget.
2. Amplify trust and recognition. People trust word-of-mouth. Ambassadors reinforce trust, raise brand awareness, and shift a community’s perception of your brand from unfamiliar to trusted.
3. Set up good relationships from the get-go. Programs result in well-engaged customers, which is directly correlated to higher satisfaction and retention.
4. Speed up your sales. Advocates’ social proof (reviews, case studies, and the like) improves buyer confidence and reduces the sales cycle length.
5. Get useful content. Ambassadors create UGC that can be leveraged for marketing purposes; this content and cross-linking may, as a byproduct, positively affect search engine results.

Takeaway

Remember that sustainable B2B sales growth isn’t achieved through isolated fixes. It’s the continuous refinement of every element and aspect that compounds into impressive results. 

Regularly sharpening your ICP, optimizing internal workflows, and actively working with your existing client base all contribute to consistent gains.

At Belkins, we provide specialized expertise in implementing and managing these advanced strategies to increase B2B sales. Tell us where you’d like to be, and let’s see how we can get you there.